Central Political and Legal Work Conference: The CCP Does Not Feel Safe

The yearly conference on Central Political and Legal Work, which concluded on January 16, is an important meeting for the Chinese Communist Party, and normally indicates priorities in the field of security and law enforcement. President Xi Jinping sent “instructions” to the conference, which were delivered by Guo Shenkun, a member of the Political Bureau of the CCP Central Committee. The Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission (CPLAC) published a summary of the conference, which was said to have reached four points of consensus.

“Consensus 1: We should pay attention to summing up the effective exploration of the political and legal fronts since the 19th Congress of the CCP.” This consensus was articulated in “ten explorations,” aimed at identifying the areas in which Xi Jinping and the CCP offered specially important instructions that CCP cadres and security personnel need to carefully study and implement.

The first is the omnipresent “Xi Jinping’s thought on the rule of law,” a legal philosophy based on the submission of the law to the CCP (rather than vice versa) that Bitter Winter has repeatedly presented to its readers. The second is to study and promote the “Regulations on the Political and Legal Work of the CCP,” which tightened the control of top leaders on rank-and-file CCP members.

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